I don’t have a lot of pictures from the December Minecraft session, because Miranda had some studying to do so she couldn’t build stuff. But Patrick was there, and he did build stuff: he found a bay that reminded him (and us!) of Porco Rosso, and he build a little house there.

The Porco Rosso bay

A closer view of the beach with the house above it

Squids cavorting nearby

I went wandering around a bit after that and took some more pictures:

Some nearby scenery

A winding river

Water high and low

Looking down into the crevasse

These clouds should be in a tetris-like game

And then I came back to take a few more pictures of how Patrick had evolved the bay:

This is just here to remind me of the coordinates

Extending the beach

Planting flowers

We first started this Minecraft world four years ago; lots of good memories.

This isn’t a rendering glitch, there really was a strange square island in the middle of the sea

A small cave entrance surrounded by animals

A mountain with lava at the corner

Cliff caves on the water

Inside one of the caves

Inside another one; yay weird physics

A village at night

For most of this year, Dan’s just been building a straight path; so I went to visit him and then started walking back along the path. (And then stopped, because the path is way too long for me to go along the whole thing.)

The explanation for the secret water door is this: last time, she’d dug into what turned out to be a pretty cool cave at the back of the hall. So she wanted to leave access to that while maintaining the hall as a hall. She ended up with a really neat solution: she added a pool of water in the hall, with the entrance to the cave at the bottom of the pool, done in such a way that Minecraft‘s water physics allows you to go into the cave from the water without the water flooding the cave. (And it really is secret, even though the pool isn’t too huge, it’s very hard to find the door if you don’t know where to go.)

We’ll be doing Minecraft a week early this month, December 18th instead of December 25th.

An abandoned foundation; I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s been a while

One of the structures in the bay turned into a floating glowing ball

Pat built a sort of ice chapel. I think it’s near the ice house he built the previous month, but I’m not entirely sure?

The top of the ice chapel

Looking up at the ice chapel ceiling

The floor of the chapel

Another view of the inside

Looking out from the roof

An outside view of the chapel

And Miranda decided to build a hall using some of the new stone types that were recently added. She hollowed out a hill not too far from the spawn point but in a direction we hadn’t explored much.

A hall with green and pink stone

A view of the ceiling

The entrance, made out of glass

An outside view at night

Adding a light on top of the entrance

After that, she decided to expand it more, making a larger space inside with some blue stone as the ceiling.

Thinking about how to expand it

Starting to hollow out the new area; you can see bits of the new ceiling

More work on the new area

While she was doing that, she ran into a cave, so I went and explored that.

A cave in the back of the hall

It keeps going. (I could have taken a lot of pictures like this, it was a decent-size cave.)

An exit at the back of the cave

A view from outside the cave

As you can see, the back of the cave was fairly close to the lava and water sculpture that Pat had built in August; we didn’t realize that it was so close to her hall! (Though it wasn’t that close, the cave was a decent length.)

Not as many pictures as normal from the September Minecraft session: Miranda couldn’t attend, and I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have of my exploration. But here’s what I have:

Patrick did some wandering around, until he came across a rather lovely snow forest with huge trees. We all went over to look, and then he built a house there.

Snow forest

Clearing snow off of the foundation for the house

The house in the snow

The front of the house

Inside the house

I poked my head around the forest, and saw a narrow crevasse behind it with a bit of lava; I went down there, and it was amazing! Just the crevasse itself opened up nicely, but there was also a mine passage at one end where you could squeeze by a bit of lava and then end up in an enormous underground system of caverns and mines. It’s pretty amazing what’s sometimes just under the surface in Minecraft.

Unfortunately, I didn’t actually take any pictures of that system. But here are some pictures of the entrance.

I decided that it might be nice to start connecting various structures to the city, so I started building a path to some of the nearby structures. It currently doesn’t look that great; I still think it’s a reasonable idea, but I’m not entirely sure how to best improve it?

My first attempt at a road

A deep pit I discovered near the road

A pass through some rock

Miranda worked on a stable some and then went wandering around as well:

Miranda and her horse

Working on her stable

She went in a different direction from me, and discovered some things that I was completely unaware of. The first is a building outline; I can’t remember the details of where it was:

A building outline

Maybe it’s connected to something else I already knew about? And the second is a quite impressive castle in the desert; we had some discussion as to whether it was procedurally generated or something that somebody had worked on but not finished and decided that it was probably the latter, e.g. there’s this inner wall that looks like something a human had begun. It already looks quite good, at any rate.

Desert castle from above

The front towers

Her horse accompanied her on the trip

She laid out a series of torches so we could find our way back; maybe that’s a better idea than my roads? Nice to have an idea of the geography in a different direction from where I’d been going.

I don’t have many pictures from the May Minecraft session, because Miranda couldn’t participate and we were mostly talking instead of building. But I did go fly to the chimney at the end of the tunnel I built in April, and took some pictures along the way.

My guitar practice has gotten into a better rhythm than last time I talked about it. I’m not sure I’m practicing more, but I’m enjoying it more and feeling I’m getting more out of it. Basically, I’ve realized that I wasn’t getting as much as I could have out of the game’s “Recommended” list in Learn a Song mode – I’d been going through the songs there in a relatively superficial fashion, going quickly from one to the next. Which is fine to spend some of my time doing, but that’s what the game’s “Nonstop Mode” is for: a good way to spend 20–30 minutes, but not the best way to spend the majority of my practice time.

So now, when I’m going through the recommended songs, I dig into individual songs more. (At least most of the time.) Instead of playing through a song once, now my most typical experience is to play a song twice, dropping into Riff Repeater mode in some sections the second time, maybe spending 15 minutes on the song? And I’m liking that a lot more: it’s transformed the experience from “play a song badly and feel dissatisfied” to one where I feel like I’m getting better in some small way on each song I try.

I’m also doing one exercise that Joan suggested, though it’s too early to see results for that. And I’m not doing Session Mode as much, which is fine; I’ll come back to that later, but it’s okay for me to take a break now. I’m also not currently focusing too much on my favorite songs, but I imagine I’ll come back to that at some point as well, too.